6 Steps to Cover Up Holes in Your Home So Rodents Don't Get In

Once rodents are already inside your home, they’re not overly difficult to trap. You can use a variety of traps and clean up so they don’t have food. These are best practices for dealing with rodents that are inside your home. However, that only goes so far. What you need to be concerned about once you capture the rodents inside your home are the rodents outside your home. If you don’t take precaution against them, you’ll soon find yourself with more rodents scurrying about your floors and counters. Rodents usually enter the inside of your home through cracks or holes on the outside of your home. Here are six steps to cover up holes in your home so rodents don’t get in:

1. Inspect High and Low

The first thing you need to do when covering up holes is to find all of them. Do a thorough inspection on the outside of your house to find any sort of entry point that a rodent could use. Rodents are usually great climbers, so don’t just search around the foundation--search high as well.

2. Seal Around Pipes and Conduits

Pipes and conduits are easy places for cracks or holes to appear. Even if they’re small, seal them. Rodents can squeeze their bodies in ways that would probably make you sick. This makes it easy for them to get into tight spaces.

3. Replace Threshold On Garage Door

Garage door thresholds wear fairly easily, and should be replaced every couple of years. When they’re not replaced, they offer easy entrances for rodents since garages are usually free of people during the night. A good rule of thumb is that if you can see light streaming through the threshold, it’s time for a new one.

4. Eliminate Vegetation

Although it may look good, any grass or vegetation surrounding the foundation of your home makes for a good hiding spot for rodents as they plot their entry. Keep it bare, so that any holes or cracks that rodents could get into are completely out in the open. Rodents don’t want to be seen.

5. Seal Joints in Sidewalk

If you have sidewalk surrounding your foundation, then be on the lookout for even the smallest of cracks where the concrete meets the house. Underneath that crack could be a bubble in the concrete where rodents can hideout. Consistently sealing the area between concrete and your house is crucial to keeping rodents out.

6. Seal all Holes

Sometimes holes happen on the outside of your home. You need to keep an eye out for them, as you never quite know when they’ll arise. When you do find them, you might try patching them with quick-setting concrete that you can mix up yourself. This will provide a strong barrier to keep the hole from re-occurring in the future.

The frustrating thing about rodents is that there are so many ways that they can get inside your home, and it can be difficult to stay on top of it. If it keeps on becoming an issue and you feel like you are surrounded by rodents, call your local pest control to see how they might be able to keep them away.